


Cantabile

by engagemythrusters



Series: Six Pieces [3]
Category: Torchwood
Genre: Anxiety, Depression, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-02
Updated: 2020-03-02
Packaged: 2021-02-28 01:41:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,599
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22985779
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/engagemythrusters/pseuds/engagemythrusters
Summary: Jack won’t get up. He’s needed.
Relationships: Jack Harkness/Ianto Jones
Series: Six Pieces [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1697989
Comments: 6
Kudos: 117





	Cantabile

**Author's Note:**

> Related to Rooftop Sonata in C Major and Fugue.

They’re still in bed.

They haven’t gotten up from bed since they’d snuggled in last night. Jack desperately has to pee. But he won’t get up. He’s needed.

Ianto’s eyes are closed. He’s not sleeping; he hasn’t been sleeping in a while. But his eyes are still closed, and every so often, his face will budge. Just a little. A slight contortion of the brow, a quiver of a lip, a sniff of his nose. One of his feet has been bouncing since four in the morning. It’s shaking the bed.

Jack really has to pee. But he won’t get up.

He thinks about summer. He wishes it was summer. He loves summer. Warmth. Sunlight. Two of the things he was programmed to love ever since his conception in his mother’s womb. He was built for the sand and the sun. Decades and decades have acclimated him to Cardiff’s dreary climate, but he’ll always be a child of the warm seas of Boeshane. 

The bed shifts in front of him as Ianto tenses so hard that even Jack can feel it, rippling through his muscles and seizing in his brain. Jack eases his hands around Ianto and brings him in close, enveloping him in a close embrace. It takes only moments for the gentle sobs and wetness on Jack’s collarbones to appear.

Ianto broke down two weeks ago, on the roof on a cold spring night, holding a found cigarette and coming undone before Jack’s eyes. They hadn’t found the time to talk to Martha. They’d called, and there had been talk of another call to set something in motion,but then the skies had filled with gas and Martha had been too busy for anything else.

So that’s where they are now. Sitting in the aftershocks of Ianto’s own private earthquake. In another minute, Ianto will stop crying—the bouts only ever last two at the most. In another five, he will draw away again, returning from his moment of “wrongness” to a moment of “emptiness”. Jack doesn’t know what “wrongness” feels like (not this kind, anyway), but from what little he can eke out of Ianto, it sits in his chest and eats away at him, slowly creeping up to his throat and down to his stomach until he’s gasping for air and sobbing in Jack’s arms. The “emptiness”... Jack knows that feeling. It’s the opposite of Ianto’s wrongness. It sucks everything out of the chest cavity. A black hole inhaling everything inside until it’s gone, all gone, leaving an empty cavern that feels unfillable. Yes, Jack knows that feeling.

He doesn’t understand how Ianto vacillates between the two feelings like this. Maybe if he understood, he could fix it. But he doesn’t. And he can’t. All he can do is hold onto Ianto and curse the universe yet again. As if the universe hadn’t already had enough of Jack’s curses...

The tears come to a lull. Jack can’t feel any more new wetness trickling sideways across his chest into the pillow below. He also can’t really feel Ianto breathing anymore. The contrast between the deep, sharp gasps for air and the refusal to take anything more than the occasional short breath in are staggering. 

Maybe they should be talking. Talking might help. That’s why people hire therapists and counsellors, and over-share to their friends and loved ones like Gwen accuses herself of doing. Yet Ianto doesn’t seem to want to open his mouth. It’s probably for the same reason Gwen berates herself; Ianto’s gotten so used to censoring and self-correcting his speech that it’s become a problem. And at this point, Jack doesn’t know whether forcing Ianto to say anything will help or harm. So, he says nothing, and continues to hold onto Ianto.

Six o’clock rolls around with the sound of Ianto’s alarm. Jack shuts it off quickly and returns his arm to Ianto. Along with his curses, Jack also has to give just the tiniest “thank you” to the universe, because the Rift has been dead for the past three days. That means it will pick up like hell sometime in the next few days, but for now it means Jack doesn’t have to drag Ianto to the Hub just to watch him lose his fragile hold on whatever sanity he could scrounge up for the moment while they wrangle a Weevil. Although, in days gone by, these days were filled with finishing up on paperwork, but Jack also doesn’t want to drag Ianto to the Hub just to watch him panic over the slightest error in a document, either. Gwen can handle the Hub and the responsibilities that come with it. Ianto needs a break. Unlike Jack and Gwen, he hasn’t had one since Tosh and Owen died. Jack just hadn’t really been expecting to spend this break watching  Ianto break.

Of course, it isn’t completely unexpected. Jack has been preparing quietly ever since that night on the roof. Even if the next morning, Ianto had gotten up and acted just fine, Jack knew this moment would come. Though the fact that it came from watching an old film he used to watch with his mother is still rather... baffling.

Jack knows the brain is a funny, fickle thing. He knows it more than most people of this century. But it’s still a shock to him to think that Ianto had an hour of feeling awful the night before, followed by feeling perfectly fine all of yesterday, until he’d suddenly snapped again sometime while he’d been down in the Archives. He’d acted as though everything was fine, because that was how Ianto was, but Jack could see his fingers trembling. So he had left Gwen in charge for the foreseeable future and had taken Ianto home.

And even then it had been tolerable until this morning, right at four, when Ianto had shot up in bed, hyperventilating for reasons still unknown to Jack.

Right now, Ianto moves. He shifts deeper into the blankets, sinking in until everything below his chin is engulfed in duvet. This is new. Ianto doesn’t usually let the blankets fall around him like this. There’s a particular way he likes them sitting on his body. But now it seems he just wants to be covered. Or maybe shielded is a better word.

“‘m sorry.”

It takes a moment for it to register in Jack’s head. The silence had taken meaning from words, and the sudden reappearance of sound is more confusing than reassuring.

“For what?” Jack asks, just as softly as Ianto’s own statement.

“This.”

Jack peels himself away, just a little. He frowns down at Ianto, though it makes little difference because Ianto is evidently floundering at the slight loss of contact. Jack knows how the emptiness sits in the chest, so he sinks back down.

“You have nothing to be sorry for,” he tells Ianto.

“Yes, I do,” Ianto mumbles back into Jack’s chest. “I shouldn’t be putting this on you. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” Jack reiterates. “Don’t ever be sorry for this. I don’t want you sad.”

Ianto stiffens in his arms. “Sorry.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Jack says lightly.

Frustration creeps into him. There’s no way he’s going to convince Ianto that he’s not being burdensome. Ianto has lived his whole life thinking his problems are not only a burden to him, but to everyone else if even shared just a little. Hell, Ianto’s lived his whole life thinking  he’s the burden.

“I’m not going to crack under your weight,” Jack tells him.

He moves closer to Ianto, positioning himself so that Ianto’s leaning onto him more.

“See?” he says gently. 

And that’s all the more he’s going to say. There’s no convincing Ianto. He’ll do his best, but it’s not going to be enough, so he’ll stop while he’s ahead right now.

Ianto doesn’t respond. He presses his cheek to Jack’s chest and says nothing, even though Jack knows he wants to say something now. Jack can practically feel it itching away in the back of Ianto’s skull. Censoring and self-correcting can only go so far. Which, Jack decides, is a good thing. He wants Ianto to talk, largely because Ianto is, by nature, a talker, and he wants Ianto to be true to Ianto.

Ianto doesn’t talk about feelings, though. There’s a line he draws around those. Jack respects the line, because Ianto respects Jack’s own line. But there is a way to have Ianto inadvertently draw the line closer to himself and let more things through.

If Ianto is left to his own devices, he will ramble away, unhindered and unstoppable.

Jack smiles to himself, cranes his neck to press a kiss down into Ianto’s hair, then asks, “Did you finish sorting out the ‘junk box’ you found in the fourth level Archives last week?”

On top of him, Ianto shifts slightly.

“Yeah,” he says. He sounds a little pathetic. A little empty. “Half of it was just scrap metal.”

“Oh, really?”

“Someone must’ve left it unlabelled, so it probably got mixed up with the unknown tech, because those were often left unlabelled. And the metal did kind of look tech-like in the first place, so it makes sense that—“

Jack closes his eyes and smiles to himself again as he feels Ianto slowly start to settle against him, and feeling the rhythm of the inhales between words and listening to Ianto’s voice lull him better than any cantabile.

Jack has to pee. He won’t get up. He’s needed, because things aren’t yet better.

But they’re certainly one step closer.

**Author's Note:**

> No cantabiles inspired (nor pair with) this, but if you want a good one, Tchaikovsky's Andante cantabile is pretty good.  
> Thank you for reading. Have a good night.


End file.
